In a very interesting development, the pub chain JD Wetherspoon have announced that they are ceasing sending monthly newsletters by email, and are deleting their database of customer email addresses.

Although the only initial evidence of this was the screenshot of the email communication (above), the company have confirmed to me on their Twitter account that the email is genuine.

Wetherspoons say the reason for the deletion is that they feel that email marketing of this kind is “too intrusive”, and that, instead of communicating marketing by email, they will “continue to release news stories on [their] website” and customers will be able to keep up to date by following them on Facebook and Twitter.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, companies such as Flybe and Honda have recently discovered that an email marketing database can be a liability if it is not clear whether the customers in question have consented to receive marketing emails (which is a requirement under the Privacy and Electronic Communications ((EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (PECR)). In March Flybe received a monetary penalty of £70,000 from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after sending more than 3.3 million emails with the title ‘Are your details correct?’ to people who had previously told them they didn’t want to receive marketing emails. These, said the ICO, were themselves marketing emails, and the sending of them was a serious contravention of PECR. Honda, less egregiously, sent 289,790 emails when they did not know whether or not the recipients had consented to receive marketing emails. This also, said ICO, was unlawful marketing, as the burden of proof was on Honda to show that they had recipients’ consent to send the emails, and they could not. The result was a £13,000 monetary penalty.

There is no reason to think Wetherspoons were concerned about the data quality (in terms of whether people had consented to marketing) of their own email marketing database, but it is clear from the Flybe and Honda cases that a bloated database with email details of people who have not consented to marketing (or where it is unclear whether they have) is potentially a liability under PECR (and related data protection law). It is a liability both because any marketing emails sent are likely to be unlawful (and potentially attract a monetary penalty) but also because, if it cannot be used for marketing, what purpose does it serve? If none, then it constitutes a huge amount of personal data, held for no ostensible purpose, which would be in contravention of the fifth principle in schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998.

For this reason, I can understand why some companies might take a commercial and risk-based decision not to retain email databases – if something brings no value, and significant risk, then why keep it?

But there is another reason Wetherspoons’ rationale is interesting: they are clearly aiming now to use social media channels to market their products. Normally, one thinks of advertising on social media as not aimed at or delivered to individuals, but as technology has advanced, so has the ability for social media marketing to become increasingly targeted. In May this year it was announced that the ICO were undertaking “a wide assessment of the data-protection risks arising from the use of data analytics”. This was on the back of reports that adverts on Facebook were being targeted by political groups towards people on the basis of data scraped from Facebook and other social media. Although we don’t know what the outcome of this investigation by the ICO will be (and I understand some of the allegations are strongly denied by entities alleged to be involved) what it does show is that stopping your e-marketing on one channel won’t necessarily stop you having privacy and data protection challenges on another.